This Man Helps Rural Kids in India Read, Write & Code

In this episode of The Boss Game, we talk to one of the most decorated entrepreneurs of India, Umesh Malhotra who is the founder of Hippocampus, a startup which runs pre and primary schools in Karnataka for than 3000 students.

Malhotra was one of the first hundred employees of IT giant Infosys. He quit Infosys to start one of the first Infrastructure managed service providers in India, Bangalore Labs. After successfully exiting from Bangalore Labs, he started Hippocampus in Bangalore.

At the start in 2011, Hippocampus had 10 children and a single teacher for them. But over the years, they added more schools, Currently they run more than 300 schools in Karnataka and Maharashtra which caters to around 12,000 students.

Malhotra says teaching kids in rural areas is more important than building re – skilling centres across the world. He believes skilling should start from top to bottom.

And he is not wrong. The facts do not lie. There are more than 99 million children aged between three to six and only 35 million children get education in government run schools which are known as ‘Anganwadi’ workers according to 2011 census data of India. The same report also says that only 32 percent of students attend school regularly.

Hippocampus is filling this gap by recruiting and training teachers in village areas. They have raised over $21 million so far.

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